Dimitrov’s United Front after the Seventh Congress by Norman Markowitz
As the Communist International’s most prominent figure, Georgi Dimitrov represented the International in attempts to implement its policies by reaching out to social democrats and other anit-fascists in the aftermath of the Seventh Congress.
In a letter the Spanish Socialist party in November 1935, he expressed solidarity with the Spanish workers struggle and directly pledged support for a united front of Spanish Socialist, Communist, and Anarcho Syndicalist workers organizations against fascism(In Spain, the anarchists were a significant force in the Spanish workers movement.
Subsequently, this United Front alliance, without the support of the anarchist workers organization leaders but with the support of most of their members defeated a coalition of monarchists, reactionaries, and fascists, which then prompted a military coup and the outbreak of a civil war in Spain which pitted the forces of the United Front against Spanish, German and Italian fascism.
In early 1936, Dimitrov reached out to the French socialist leader Leon Blum, the target of a savage physical assault by fascist hoodlums, and defined the attack as an example of fascist regard for rights and law along with strong support for the strengthening and broadening of a United Front already in development in France. Specifically Dimitrov linked these actions with fascist provocations through the world and called for strong concerted action by the working class and its parties to disarm these criminal groups
Within months, the French alliance, called le Front Populaire(the Popular Front) won a political victory and established, for a brief period, a national government that from the perspective of the French working class, that would enact the most far-reaching pro working class reforms in French history. The popular front came to be the term used in many countries for many of the policies of the United Front
The French Popular Front government was not the revolutionary government of the Paris Commune, but a government that established the 40 hour week and negotiated a national labor contract which compelled French employers to give the majority of French workers significant wage increases, along with a variety of other significant reforms.
In a May Day, 1936 address, Dimitrov addressed the “struggle for peace” by stating “the peace that exists at present is a bad peace.”
Better than war, but a peace that does not confront the danger of fascist aggression, Here Dimitrov looks at Japanese imperialism in China and Italian imperialism in Ethiopia and calls for a real international policy of sanctions and “punishments” against the aggressor nations.
But, while calling for an anti-war policy through the League of Nations (which the Soviet Union was advancing at the time) Dimitrov makes clear that it is the working class both nationally and through international solidarity, that can advance an anti-fascist peace policy, that can wake up capitalist states directly threatened by fascist aggression to act in their own immediate interests rather than appeasing the fascists out of their fear of socialist revolution. This aspect of the United Front would of course not be successful as the European non fascist capitalist states, led by the conservative British Empire government of Neville Chamberlain, would choose pro-fascist and in their own minds anti-Communist and anti- socialist appeasement over an anti-fascist United Front policy.
In an address on the fifteenth anniversary of the formation of the Chinese Communist party (October, 1936) Dimitrov focuses on the struggle of the CCP against “the Japanese fascist military clique” and stresses the importance of this struggle to world affairs.
Specifically, Dimitrov looks to “public opinion” in Britain, France, and the U.S.A, where a Eurocentric mass media has provided limited information on Japanese imperialism to encourage both mass ignorance and indifference, to understand that the Japanese imperialist threat is a central part of the fascist danger, that, as Dimitrov notes prophetically, “the alliance between German fascism and the Japanese military clique, directed toward the dismemberment and enslavement of China and toward unloosing a new imperialist world war.”
The establishment of a Second United Front between what had seemed to be irreconcilable enemies, Chiang Kai-shek’s largely reactionary nationalist Kuomintang party and regime and the CCP would lead the Japanese militarists to launch a full scale, albeit undeclared war in China in 1937, a war that one can see as the real beginning of the Second World War.
Thirteen years after Dimitrov’s address, around its 28th anniversary, the Chinese Communist Party had led the Chinese people in the struggle against Japanese imperialism and having decisively defeated Chiang’s U.S. armed and supported regime, would establish the Peoples Republic of China in October 1949.
The rest of the Dimitrov’s The United Front, deals with the civil war raging in Spain, the supreme dangers and demands of the new global fascist threat, and the significant attempts to build a stronger and more effective unity of action between Communists socialists and other anti-fascists. We will look at those articles in the next and final installment
